Russ Feingold Was Proved Fucking Right

A number of you have been asking for my intro of Russ Feingold last Thursday. Here it is. Now that I’ve had a chance to see it I realize I had a number of misstatements (and a number of places where I glossed necessary detail–I guess I speak like I blog, for better or worse).

New York Times national security correspondent James Risen has formally asked a federal judge in Virginia to reject the government’s attempts to force Risen to identify his confidential sources at an upcoming trial for a former Central Intelligence Agency officer charged with leaking classified information.

Lawyers for Risen filed a motion Tuesday with U.S. District Court Judge Leonie Brinkema, asking her to quash a subpoena seeking his testimony against ex-CIA officer Jeffrey Sterling. Prosecutors have charged Sterling with being a source for information Risen published about a classified CIA program aimed at undermining Iran’s nuclear program. The program is described in Risen’s 2006 book, “State of War”…

The motion filed by his legal team is here (59 page PDF) and an accompanying affidavit by Risen is here (22 page PDF).

The local Pacifica radio yesterday played part of Feingold*s speech to Netroots Nation. I guess the US Supreme court*s Citizens United decision is something Feingold wants Obama*s campaign to accentuate; I thought Feingold found a more balanced way of describing CU*s effects than Obama*s State of the Union address did last January.

Footnote: ?So, what was rapporteur Judith Miller formerly of the NY Times, so right about?

I just got back and have some things I have to do today (including an air conditioner that went out while gone and it’s a 113 or so here today – good thing we have two). Also have a court appearance I must make. But, maybe tonight, I would like to get into the depths of the Risen filings. For now I will note, this is the same judge and issue in which Risen already beat the government on a subpoena. Sooo…

7:10 Rumors swirled last night that Barrett Brown, the writer often described as a “spokesman” for Anonymous until recently, had come up with a startling revelation that would appear today in the NYT and the Guardian and maybe elsewhere. I haven’t had time to check yet if anything has appeared in the media so far but this morning’s email (he says to only a dozen reporters) brings this intro from Brown: “The following document will be posted on the Project PM wiki, http://wiki.echelon2.org/wiki/Main_Page, within 24 hours; a shorter summary will go up on The Guardian’s website at some point afterward. This particular e-mail is going out to a dozen or so reporters who I believe to be equipped to run with it. The New York Times and a few other outlets were provided with this last night. Further details concerning the program described may be found by searching through the HBGary e-mails with this viewer: http://search.hbgary.anonleaks.ch/. Any outlet or individual is free to run this in whole or in part. If anyone has any questions, let me know.”

Here’s his opening: “For at least two years, the US has been conducting a secretive and immensely sophisticated campaign of mass surveillance and data mining against the Arab world, allowing the intelligence community to monitor the habits, conversations, and activity of millions of individuals at once. And with an upgrade scheduled for later this year, the top contender to win the federal contract and thus take over the program is a team of about a dozen companies which were brought together in large part by Aaron Barr – the same disgraced CEO who resigned from his own firm earlier this year after he was discovered to have planned a full-scale information war against political activists at the behest of corporate clients. The new revelation provides for a disturbing picture, particularly when viewed in a wider context.” He warns that this apparatus could be used within the US and elsewhere in the world. Details to come.

In February 2011, the hackers’ collective Anonymous released 70,000 emails from security contractor HBGary, which revealed that CEO Aaron Barr had offered the firm’s services to mount cyber-attacks against WikiLeaks and others on behalf of corporate clients.

After having spent several months studying those emails and otherwise investigating the industry depicted therein, I have revealed my summary of a classified US intelligence programme known as Romas/COIN, as well as its upcoming replacement, known as Odyssey. The programme appears to allow for the large-scale monitoring of social networks by way of such things as natural language processing, semantic analysis, latent semantic indexing and IT intrusion. At the same time, it also entails the dissemination of some unknown degree of information to a given population through a variety of means – without any hint that the actual source is US intelligence.

Altogether, the existence and nature of Romas/COIN should confirm what many had already come to realise over the past few years, in particular: the US and other states have no intention of allowing populations to conduct their affairs without scrutiny.

After having spent several months studying those emails and otherwise investigating the industry depicted therein, I have revealed my summary of a classified US intelligence programme known as Romas/COIN, as well as its upcoming replacement, known as Odyssey. The programme appears to allow for the large-scale monitoring of social networks by way of such things as natural language processing, semantic analysis, latent semantic indexing and IT intrusion. At the same time, it also entails the dissemination of some unknown degree of information to a given population through a variety of means – without any hint that the actual source is US intelligence.

So, what can we do about this? Can someone stop this through court action? We have a neo-liberal President, a bought and paid for Congress (just extended the Patriot Act), and a radically conservative majority on the Supreme Court. I hate to say this, but I think the only way this will change direction is for the rest of the world to recognize what is happening and do something about it.

ondelette,
according to my geek street sources (in this case, ZDNet), the person arrested was associated with Lulz, which has a reputation for cockiness and bravado. IOW, this is one of the loud-mouth braggarts who drew excessive attention to themselves. Unlike the NYT, they did not seem to think much of the connection with Anonymous.

It is good to know that the USG cyberwar against Wikileaks has not shut it down, even if Assange’s dick is on the chopping block. I interpret “freedom of the press” to include Wikileaks, and am sure that if Tom Paine were alive today, he’d be working with wikileaks.

One of the articles I read said the guy had recently pissed off the group and they had published all of his personal info (name, birth date, address, etc..) Not much detective work on the part of the authorities there.

bmaz,
In your comment, who is “they”? Lulz Security in particular, or Wikileaks in general?

I realize that Wikileaks is inviting retaliation from the governments whose documents have been publicized. And I suspect that there is a real cyberwar going on both by and against Wikileaks. However, I also think they are doing a public service, a la Daniel Ellsberg. This does not excuse or exonerate them, and what they are doing is not legal, but I still think that Thomas Paine would have loved what they are doing, and would do it himself (especially while the British were still trying to run things in eastern North America.

your introduction was engaging and informative, with a nice thread of humor woven throughout. in particular, for me, it was informative with respect to sen. feingold’s impeccable sense of the public good on a large range of issues over a long time span.

i hope, like others before him, that once free of the senate’s sucking mud, feingold can return to public service in a format that multiplies his talents and vision rather than mutes them.

A group of Michigan residents have filed a suit challenging a controversial new state law that allows the governor to appoint an un-elected emergency manager or corporation to take over financially distressed towns and cities and effectively fire elected officials. The law empowers these unelected managers to sell off public property, shred union contacts and privatize government services without any input from local voters. Michigan now has un-elected emergency managers running the schools in Detroit, as well as the cities of Pontiac, Ecorse and Benton Harbor. We speak to longtime Detroit resident, Edith Lee-Payne, one of the plaintiffs in the lawsuit; and John Philo, legal director of the Maurice & Jane Sugar Law Center for Economic and Social Justice, which filed the lawsuit against the state of Michigan.

Seriously, all this “conflict of interest” stuff is, quite unfortunately, going nowhere as to Thomas. It is simply settled by Scalia and his shrill little place marker in the Cheney energy task force mess. People can yammer all they want, but the best way to attack Clarence Thomas is on the criminally and civilly illegal disclosure violations from he and his wife’s tax reporting. Those offenses are crystal clear under the law and if they are not going to be pursued, clamoring about conflicts is going nowhere with a bullet. I wish it were different, but I just cannot see how it is.

Well, some are trying to do something about it. There are a number of petitions going around asking him to resign. That won’t happen, but some of the documented conflict of interest charges may be worthy of impeachment. Which is where bmaz’s comment leads us.

And some will say, “But there’s no chance that it will succeed,” to which I would reply, so what? I’m interested in the *public process,* at least, which will bring Thomas’s conflicted and illegal behavior to widespread public attention. To remain silent in the face of such abuses of power is to condone them. Thanks for not being silent and for bringing this to our attention.

I am not surprised by the Yoo comment. Go read my last few comments and the documents I linked to in the bmaz post about Obama War Powers. Yoo made his comment to protect himself due to War Powers testimony he gave to defend Bush. (Seriously, go read his testimony I linked to.) Yoo is full of bull and just practicing CYA.

fatster, the two documents that I linked to are your kind of reading for the kind of research you appreciate.